A lot of the sci-fi of the last century focussed on fear and dystopia. It can be fun, it can make for good film and literature, but does it really help society if so many of our visions of the future are unrelentingly bleak?

Ed Finn is involved in an initiative called Project Hieroglyph, trying to get science fiction writers to break their addiction to the negative.

Transcript

Today on the show: encouraging sci-fi writers to overcome their dystopian tendencies; mapping the true extent of the internet to limit its vulnerabilities; and using the web to highlight the destructive reality of one of modern warfare's silent killers.

Phil Donahue [archival]: We are dropping bombs on crowded cities at night where old people and children are sleeping.

James Bridle: I find it very strange that we've got used to a very media saturated world, you know, having incredible access to the battlefield, the actual conflicts that are occurring, and frequently that has really changed our understanding of the nature of war and of the politics behind it. But now with the kind of wars we are fighting with unmanned vehicles in parts of the world that neither journalists nor soldiers on the ground have any access to, these wars are conducted without scrutiny. So, one of the aims of Dronestagram is to make visible the landscapes in which this war is taking place. So, you know, these aren't just names you hear about occasionally on the news, if you hear about them at all, they are real places, they are towns and villages, they are places where people live, where kids go to school, there are hospitals, you know, to bring a little more reality to these locations and hopefully a little more empathy and understanding.

Antony Funnell: James Bridle in London, and we'll hear more about his website Dronestagram a little later in the program.

But first to sci-fi and the way it speaks to us about the future.

[War of the Worlds movie trailer]

It's hard not to notice the fact that so much of the science fiction we consume is dark and pessimistic. If we aren't being killed by aliens, then we're killing ourselves or struggling to cope with the planet and Mother Nature as they turn against us.

The net impact upon our psyche of so much dystopian imagining is something that troubles Ed Finn and his colleagues at Arizona State University. In fact, so concerned was the university that it decided to set up a Centre for Science and the Imagination to promote a more optimistic view of the future. And it's also now launched an initiative called Project Hieroglyph specifically designed to…how do I put this? Well, to turn sci-fi writers into a much more cheery bunch.

Ed Finn: Both of these ideas came out of one conversation that the president of our university had with the science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson. Stephenson was at an event in Washington DC where he was talking about how dystopian all of our visions for the future seem to have become. Every new book and movie is about the world ending catastrophically or, even worse, not ending and staggering on into some horrific post-apocalyptic hell-scape.

And at the same time, while that is very depressing, we seem to have also lost our ambition to do big new stuff. We went from the Apollo missions to paying other countries to fly our astronauts into space. We went from the grand infrastructure projects of the '50s and '60s and designing intercontinental commercial transit aeroplanes, to using almost the same machines to get around that we did then, and using the very same infrastructure that is now decaying and falling apart that we built 50 years ago.

And so Stephenson was saying why aren't we thinking big anymore, why aren't we doing ambitious new stuff? And the president of ASU's response to that was, well, maybe this is all your fault, maybe it's the science-fiction writers who are letting us down who need to be coming up with more creative and ambitious dreams for the future.

And so that was the spark that launched both Project Hieroglyph and the Centre. The conversation landed on my desk, I was a fellow at Arizona State University at the time, and the question was, well, what could we do with this? How could a university be part of this? How could we come up with an institution or a platform that would support these ideas, this broad public conversation, but also make sense within a research context and actually advance some of these ideas in terms of scholarship, in terms of the scientific endeavour?

Antony Funnell: So both with the Project Hieroglyph and with your Centre, it's about marrying science-fiction narrative with scientific discipline, isn't it?

Ed Finn: Yes. So the mission of our Centre is very simply to get people thinking more creatively and ambitiously about the future, and I'd say that's at the core of Project Hieroglyph as well. I like to think of Project Hieroglyph as science-fiction about the present, stuff that we could do now if we simply set our minds to it. So the guidelines we have for our writers are to engage directly with scientists and engineers to explore the full possibility space of the world that we live in a now, to think about ideas that are eminently doable but just lack a certain kind of will or a lack a really good story.

That's where the term 'hieroglyph' comes from, this idea that there are these emblems that we've inherited from great science-fiction, the idea of the robot, the rocketship, and a really good story can then shape generations of thinking about those ideas. We can't think of robots now without thinking about Asimov's three laws. And so the core of the project is thinking about how we can create new hieroglyph ideas, new stories that will become so embedded, so tantalisingly exciting that we can't help but integrate them into our cultural consciousness and the way that we think about the future and everyday life.

Antony Funnell: And as I understand it there are two overarching rules; no pessimism, and no magic. Could I get you to explain both of those, in the context of science-fiction particularly?

Ed Finn: Absolutely, and I will say that these are guidelines rather than rules, and we are not forcing anybody. In terms of pessimism, it's worth recognising that utopias make for really boring stories, and one man's utopia can also be somebody else's dystopia. So we advocate what we call thoughtful optimism, the notion not that we have to only think of happy and possible futures, the best possible world, but that we should be thinking through all of the possibilities and exploring the ways in which we could conceivably improve our lot. So, 'no pessimism' is one of the guidelines.

And the second one is 'no magic', and this one I think is equally important, to come up with science-fiction that is truly grounded in what we know now, in contemporary research, cutting-edge research to be sure, things that might become feasible within the next few years, but the central guideline there is to write science-fiction stories that could inspire a young scientist or engineer to achieve that goal within his or her professional lifetime.

Antony Funnell: If science-fiction has become so negative in its imagining of the future, as you and the people involved in Project Hieroglyph say, why has it become that way, why has it gone down that path?

Ed Finn: That's a complex answer. There are a lot of different factors, ranging from the disillusionment we have felt on a species-wide global scale with science and technology during the Second World War and after. Our entrance to the atomic age was the end I think of a certain kind of naive optimism in our relationship with science and technology as the cure-all for social ills. And I think it also has to do with the relationship we've come increasingly to have with grand projects, with national projects, with international and global projects. We went from the optimism of the Kennedy era and the United Nations to a much more nuanced and complex relationship with the world, with the big ideas. We've seen how dangerous big ideas can be.

And so I think at this point it's much easier to be a critic than it is to advance a positivistic notion of the future, and it's easy to be an incisive, witty, funny critic, and I think that critical fiction has a very important place. I wouldn't trade any book for Brave New World or 1984, I think they remain incredibly valuable pieces of dystopian fiction and warnings about how things could go wrong.

But I think that the pessimistic trend is related to a lot of different factors, and some of them are simply market factors. Again, it's much less risky to tell a dystopian tale, especially when you think of the Hollywood context, than it is to try and come up with a more nuanced or more positivistic vision of the future.

Antony Funnell: Your Centre, the Centre for Scientific Imagination, and Project Hieroglyph, they are both about pursuing serious endeavours, but is it important that science-fiction still retain an escapist element?

Ed Finn: Well, I think that it's possible to do both. I think one of the core ideas that we are trying to transmit here is that science itself can be a creative space and a fun space. There's this unfortunate term 'hard science-fiction' to convey the subgenre of writing that deals seriously with scientific issues. But there's hard science-fiction that is quite beautiful and poetic and creative and funny, and I think that is important to remember.

So the reason that the word 'imagination' is in the title of the Centre that I founded is that I really think that is a core space, I think of it as a third access that allows us to escape from the disciplinary turf wars that characterise a lot of university politics but also characterises the relationship between science-fiction and other genres. The imagination is a space that we are all invited to, it's not a space that any one discipline or group of people possesses, it's something that we are all invited to, and it allows us to speak on equal terms, to be creative and playful. And I think opening up that space of the imagination is at the core of Project Hieroglyph and the Centre's work.

There is a line that Neal Stephenson likes to use which is that a good science fiction story can save you hundreds of hours of PowerPoint sessions and meetings because it plants that seed, that germ of an idea in everybody's head, and so while all of the details might not be fleshed out, everybody is in unison on what the larger goal is.

Antony Funnell: Tell us about some of the work that has come out of Project Hieroglyph. And I presume that there is an emphasis as well on concrete ideas, on concrete outcomes, it's not just about writing.

Ed Finn: So Hieroglyph does have multiple goals. The first one is to pull together an anthology of these stories, and we are actually working on that right now with a goal of having this anthology come out. We're under contract with HarperCollins and it should come out in the United States some time in late 2014, if all goes well.

So the first goal is to create these stories, but I'd say that the process by which we are bringing these different people together of very different backgrounds is just as important as the collection that comes out at the end of it, and I'm very excited to see how writers, scientists, engineers, students, designers, and all sorts of people, city planners, people who we never contacted directly but just found the site on their own have rolled up their sleeves and gotten involved in all sorts of fascinating conversations.

And so we are seeing these tangible results, first of all in terms of building a community, and we invested a lot of thought and effort into how we could create Hieroglyph as a virtual community. So it's important to note that these collaborations that we are fostering between the writers and the scientists and engineers are by and large happening online. We are not flying everybody out and locking them in a room together which in a lot of ways would have been much easier. And so that means that we are encouraging everybody to use these digital platforms, but we are also inviting in a broad public. So anybody can go on the site and comment and engage with people like Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, and that has been very exciting.

So in terms of the stories that we are seeing come out of this, Neal Stephenson's is probably the farthest along, since he is really the founder of Project Hieroglyph, that was the second idea to come out of that conversation with the president of ASU, Michael Crow. And so his story basically starts with the question; how tall could we build something? And he found a structural engineer here at ASU, a very distinguished professor of structural engineering who has literally written the book on the subject.

And we weren't really sure how it was going to work out, you know, Neal found this guy out of the blue and we didn't know if this engineer would be interested at all or have any time to work with this science-fiction writer on this crazy idea. And they've been having an incredible time. He's been having lots of fun. Keith Hjelmstad is the name of this engineer and he said, 'You know, I would never be allowed to ask these questions or write about this in a traditional engineering journal.' More shocking to me was that he said, 'I've been doing this for 20 years or more and nobody has ever asked the question how tall could we build something. That's not the approach that professional engineers take when they are designing buildings.' And it's a very provocative question to ask and it really lights up his students and his colleagues. It's a way to get people grappling with complex problems that can't be solved by turning to chapter two of your textbook but involves lots of creative thinking and critical thinking and synthesising very different areas of knowledge.

So the tall tower project has evolved into this vision for a 15- to 20-kilometre tall tower. Currently we are talking about how you could build it out of steel, not any kind of magical new material that doesn't exist. And so it has already taken all sorts of interesting directions from how you might generate power from it to where you would put it and deal with the jet stream, aerodynamics, the idea of vertical cities and what you would do. If you were to invest the incredible resource as you would need to construct such a thing, how would you do it? How would you make it financially, culturally and intellectually viable? And so that has been a really fascinating project.

Antony Funnell: Professor Ed Finn from Arizona State University, the Centre for Science and Imagination, thank you very much for joining us.

Ed Finn: Thank you again.

Guests

Dr Ed Finn

Co-editor of Project Hieroglyph and director of the Center for Science and the Imagination